Search results for "Scrutiny"
showing 10 items of 47 documents
Terrorism in the Website
2020
Without any doubt, terrorism causes higher levels of anxiety and very well enhances our fears as never before. The post 9/11 context witnesses the multiplication of xenophobic expressions, such as Islamophobia or tourist-phobia, only to name a few. These expressions result from a culture of intolerance, which not only was enrooted in the ideological core of western capitalism but was accelerated just after 9/11. Some voices emphasize the needs of employing technology to make this world a safer place. This chapter goes in a contradictory direction. The authors focus on the ethical limitations of technologies when they are subordinated to the ideals of zero-risk society. Echoing Sunstein and …
'Maleducados/Ill-mannered' during the #A28 political campaign on Twitter: A metapragmatic study of impoliteness labels and comments in Spanish
2020
AbstractThis paper approaches the study of conflict through an examination of Spanish metapragmatic labels and comments of impoliteness on Twitter. The aim is twofold. It first aims to confirm the attributed importance of the labelmaleducado/ill-mannered in the specific context of Twitter and of digital discourse more generally, on quantitative and comparative grounds; then, it investigates this label, and the metapragmatic comments where it occurred, in a contextualized corpus of tweets compiled during the political campaign of Spain’s General Elections of April 28, 2019. The study draws from fivead hoccorpora specifically compiled from Twitter, and a general corpus of Spanish digital disc…
Revisiting agricultural modernisation: Interconnected farming practices driving rural development at the farm level
2019
Abstract Rural development related to agriculture can roughly be divided into two trajectories: 1) agri-industrial development or modernisation, and 2) multifunctional or even post-productivist rural development. The role of these trajectories varies in different rural settings, with different emphases on agricultural production and its conduct. At the farm level, the trajectories evolve from existing farming practices and their connections, which enable or disable different kinds of development. However, the connections through which changes in agricultural production practices contribute to different rural development trajectories deserve further scrutiny. This is addressed with the help …
Combining Benford's Law and machine learning to detect money laundering. An actual Spanish court case.
2017
Abstract Objectives This paper is based on the analysis of the database of operations from a macro-case on money laundering orchestrated between a core company and a group of its suppliers, 26 of which had already been identified by the police as fraudulent companies. In the face of a well-founded suspicion that more companies have perpetrated criminal acts and in order to make better use of what are very limited police resources, we aim to construct a tool to detect money laundering criminals. Methods We combine Benford’s Law and machine learning algorithms (logistic regression, decision trees, neural networks, and random forests) to find patterns of money laundering criminals in the conte…
Dasymetric distribution of votes in a dense city
2017
[EN] A large proportion of electoral analyses using geography are performed on a small area basis, such as polling units. Unfortunately, polling units are frequently redrawn, provoking breaks in their data series. Previous electoral results play a key role in many analyses. They are used by political party workers and journalists to present quick assessments of outcomes, by political scientists and electoral geographers to perform detailed scrutinizes and by pollsters and forecasters to anticipate electoral results. In this paper, we study to what extent more complex geographical approaches (based on a proper location of electors on the territory using dasymetric techniques) are of value in…
Bibliometric analysis of publications by South African viticulture and oenology research centres
2012
We analysed the production, impact factor of, and scientific collaboration involved in viticulture and oenology articles associated with South African research centres published in international journals during the period 1990–2009. The articles under scrutiny were obtained from the Science Citation Index database, accessed via the Web of Knowledge platform. The search strategy employed specific viticulture and oenology terms and was restricted to the field ‘topic’. The results showed that 406 articles were published during the review period, with the most number of publications being in the South African Journal of Enology and Viticulture (n = 34), American Journal of Enology and Vit…
Conversion as Negotiation. Converts as Actors of Civil Society
2020
This article focuses on the religious movement of the Ahmadiyya and its civil society organization, Humanity First, in West-Africa and in Europe. Particular attention is paid to the place of converts within these two institutions. Conversions to an Islamic minority and the actions of this minority are studied through the prism of social commitment. I examine the intersections between religious values, the ideas of solidarity in the societies under scrutiny and, the kaleidoscopic range of Muslim charities. The paper investigates conversion as negotiation in regard to gender, social mobility, and power. Conversion is approached here as a matter of social relations and not personal belief. I a…
Mate choice for indirect genetic benefits: scrutiny of the current paradigm
2007
Summary 1Sexual selection through mate choice, and in particular female choice for indirect fitness benefits for their offspring, is a major paradigm that currently seems to enjoy almost unequivocal acceptance. A large body of theoretical work has been built to explain the evolution of mate choice in the absence of direct benefits, and the empiricists have enthusiastically verified the various assumptions and predictions of the theory. 2However, the relative importance of mate choice for indirect benefits in comparison to choice for direct benefits or to other mechanisms of sexual selection such as male–male competition or sensory exploitation remains a controversial issue, and this seems t…
Diversification of old-age care services for older people: Trade-offs between coverage, diversification and targeting in European countries.
2011
Information on public services for older people is often limited to institutional care and Home Help/ Home Care, be it for individuals in surveys, statistics for a specific country or for international comparisons. Yet, these two major services in many countries are supplemented — or substituted — by other, minor services. The latter include services such as transportation services, meals-on-wheels, alarm systems, and day care. In this study the authors use various data sources to provide information on all or most of these types of support for Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, England, Spain, and Israel, concluding with a closer scrutiny of Swedish service profiles. When all types of suppo…
Corporate Sustainability – From a Fuzzy Concept to a Coherent Reality
2018
Abstract During the last few decades, the search for sustainability has experienced a tremendous momentum, encompassing all the levels of the global system. Fuelled by complex (both proactive and reactive) motivators, the process has surpassed the characteristics of an intellectual endeavor – more preoccupied by idealist goals, and less focused on the actual means to achieve them – and has proved that it can successfully be transposed into the corporate real world – of decision making, objective assessment, and relentless scrutiny. The paper aims to (broadly) explore the world of the most sustainable corporations – based on a descriptive (factual and dynamic) analysis of Corporate Knight’s …